I run away from do-it-at-home tests because they take up too much of my free time. It's way too easy to find work as a developer, I'll pick an employer that trusts my interview and references and doesn't expect me to jump through hoops. I'll happily provide samples of prior work (it's on GitHub).
People complained loudly to Microsoft regarding the all-caps of Visual Studio 2012/13 and Office 2013 during their pre-releases. What happened? They remained there, shouting back at the user in the finals.
Userbase? Sure. Money? Um, go spec up a 3D graphics workstation and see what those things cost. You don't need a billion customers to turn a profit selling that kind of gear.
1) All patents expire after 2 years. If you can't make money from having a 2-year monopoly on an invention, it obviously wasn't very good anyway.
2) Getting a patent costs a €LARGE_AMOUNT of money, which goes into a fund that the government uses to invest into research.
3) No sales bans. The only penatly for "violating" a patent is compensation for actual damages, the burden of proof for which lie on the patent holder.
4) If out of a random sample of five university students in the appropriate field, at least three find your idea obvious and/or trivial to come up with, your patent is rejected.
5) (Very) generous exemptions from the all of the above for non-profits, educational users and independent (non-corporate) inventors.
E-mail uses push notifications, you make it sound like it's on a 30 minute polling interval but that's simply not the case - it's nearly instant, certainly every bit as fast as on Android. Twitter does the same thing. Just read the documentation if you don't want to take my word for it. Using polling for any kind of instant messaging is not something you want to do since it's massively inefficient, much better to let the server tell you when there's something new to fetch.
As for porting, what you are describing is the same on every platform. You have an iOS app and want to port it to Android? Better brush up on those Java skills because your ObjC is worthless there. You can theoretically use C/C++ as a lowest common denominator between the two but almost nobody does that except possibly for some very core functionality and then you have to write a ton of platform-specific wrappers for the device-dependent stuff anyway. Oh and the UI, which is probably the most time-consuming single part of your app if you want to get it right.
I will give you this - being the minority platform, WP7 certainly stands more to lose from not sharing a common language with Android/iOS than the other way around. I don't really want WP7 apps that are just least-effort ports of Android apps though, and if you're as concerned about battery life as you say then you should find the thought of porting over a big fat VM just to run a few more apps abhorrent. It's not like porting is that hard, and unlike Android, WP7 is actually fun to code for. I've put one app on the market already and am working on a second. Never could muster up the energy to do that for Android, well not on my spare time anyway, there's just too much pomp and ceremony required to get anything done. I do code for Android at work though, since they're paying me well to put up with it.:)
Strange, I seem to have no trouble receiving mail while I'm doing other things on my WP7. Perhaps because the "extremely limited means" are actually quite sufficient. I believe limiting multitasking a bit is a tradeoff for better battery life, and that's certainly fine by me. Apps like navigation and music players (Spotify, Nokia Music) seem to have no trouble whatsoever with me switching to a different app and back. The web browser dutifully remembers which tabs I had open. So no, not a big deal at all. The Skype limitation I believe is a beta issue.
C/C++ support is probably coming eventually but - are you kidding me? Lack of a Java runtime an impediment? C# is by far a nicer language to program in, and is instantly accessible to any Java developer (being basically Java++ by design). Lack of Java support doesn't seem to have particularly hurt Apple in their quest for global mobile domination. The only possible use I can see for Java on WP7 would be to make porting of Android apps easier but they would feel right out of place on WP7 anyway since it has a very different UI.
Not really true anymore. I've had a Lumia 800 since november and the only two things I'm really missing now is a native app for Google+ (though the mobile web version works fine) and something that can talk to the OBD2 Bluetooth dongle I have for my car. Not exactly your Angry Birds of smartphone apps. Also, a lot of the WP7 apps feel more polished than their Android versions. The Facebook app for instance.
Maybe this varies from country to country, but here in Sweden, the decimeter, deciliter, centimeter and centiliter, hectogram (typically just called "hecto" for short) are used very frequently and you would have a hard time finding anyone over the age of 7 who doesn't have an intuitive understanding of them.
However, we pretty much never use "deca" and "hectoliter" is very rare, though most people know what they are.
This article stinks on so many levels. It is well-known that Nokia had an internal war going on for years around the Symbian platform, resulting in, among other things, the well-designed but effectively DOA Nokia N9 which in effect became the prototype for the Lumia 800. Maybe Meego would have gone on to be a market-leading platform, but it got buried by politics. Clearly this guy was on the losing team and now he's trying to use whatever authority he still thinks he has to trash-talk Nokia.
Yet the very first comment on his blog post is proof that Nokia is far from dead. No, market share for Windows Phone 7 isn't that great, but it's obviously growing at a rapid rate, and even if it never passes Android or iOS - there's plenty of room in the market for a third player. Blackberry was it for years until they shit the bed.
What the world most certainly doesn't need is yet another Android phone manufacturer. We already have more than enough. Microsoft had the cash that Nokia needed and an OS that, while not perfect, is certainly a differentiator. Couple this with Nokia's design sense and you get a phone which stands out in the sea of blandness (and the fact that the Lumia 800 alone now accounts for something like 85% of all WinPhone7 sales in the EU is evidence of this).
I don't want to go too much into subjective opinion here, but my own experiences with the Lumia 800 is that it is a damn good phone and a pleasure to develop for. It performs much better than its meager specs would suggest. It is certainly proving popular in my circle of friends, almost all of which owned high-end Android phones before. Thanks to the apparent ease of porting stuff from Xbox, there is a ton of great games for it. And it's being marketed VERY competently - certainly better than any Android phone I've seen except possibly Samsung's. I have a very hard time believing it will flop.
However - and this is important - even if I'm wrong, Microsoft can easily afford not to have Windows Phone 7 be an instant success. They are swimming in money. And so can Nokia, because they are feeding off Microsoft. It's happened before with the Xbox, the same Xbox that got laughed at and is now making enough money that Microsoft can afford to keep going at the smartphone business until they succeed.
Try something like Steam where buying and installing a game is something like four clicks (one to select the game, one to click install, one to confirm the payment information and one to start the game). They have quite a few "classic" games as well, updated to run on the latest version of Windows with sound and graphics.
The grandparent was making a claim ("Does anyone really like Microsoft, other than those who swear by their products and services? I really doubt it.") trivially disproved by example, so I thought an anecdote appropriate. I have never doubted that there exists people who really don't use Windows at all - in fact I know some of those as well, but this was not relevant to my point, which was solely to point out that there are, in fact, computer geeks who use Windows by choice.
Does anyone really like Microsoft, other than those who swear by their products and services? I really doubt it. Most users just seem to be forced to put up with it and are either ignorant of other options or afraid of trying something unfamiliar.
I have used Linux, BSD, MacOS (X) and Solaris but my home computers (laptop, gaming PC, two servers) all run Windows, because it gets things done and I haven't had a BSOD or a serious issue with it for years. Finding drivers or apps is never a problem because everyone develops for Windows first, Mac OS X second, Linux probably never or perhaps a distant third.
Being a geek most of my friends are as well and Windows is still by far the most common OS on their home PCs. One guy bought a shiny MBP and promptly installed Windows on it. Pretty much everyone who runs Linux dual-boots with Windows. So yes, when given a choice, even very computer-literate people will freely choose Windows. Because it gets things done, doesn't crash and has drivers for everything. Simple as that.
You chose to wear that leash, don't complain if it doesn't fit.
I have a desk job with a computer and e-mail. I have a cellphone with my work e-mail so I can stay updated while I'm not in the office, but I only really read it while I'm working. I guess if something really important came up my boss could call me in, and I'd be happy to oblige if I could because I know I would be compensated for it. So far this hasn't ever happened, though. My work weeks are 40 hours, although I feel no need to keep track of every minute - sometimes I leave a bit early, sometimes late. My boss doesn't really mind when I leave so long as work gets done on time. There's no punch clock where I work.
You may claim that my situation is unique and that I've been very lucky but this has been the same for the last three places I've worked in. I only left those jobs because I wanted better pay and more interesting things to do. The same goes for pretty much everyone I know. If you find yourself "leashed" to work, your cellphone or your boss's whims, switch employers. There are plenty - PLENTY - out there that care about keeping their employees happy. It has nothing to do with technology.
I wonder if this is simply a more expensive version of ReadyBoost. Similarly, it takes your most frequently used files and puts them on a flash drive for faster access times, in a way that is transparent to the end user. In this case I wonder if there would be any speed gain from using this on a PC running Windows 7 with ReadyBoost? Caching always introduces some overhead, so rather than using multiple levels of "flash cache" it might be better to simply turn ReadyBoost off in that case. My experience with ReadyBoost has been that it does indeed improve performance, but in no way close to using a real SSD as the system drive.
Windows Mobile does not have a backwards/forwards compatibility problem with desktop Windows because both run.NET. The GUI parts are different in places but you don't want to re-use those anyways as a desktop UI looks and works like crap on a mobile device. For the most part, though - and certainly including such basic bits as color management -.NET on the desktop is a perfect superset of.NET Compact Framework on Windows Mobile. Furthermore, the docs neatly outline what is available in CF and what isn't. At one of my previous jobs we used to literally compile the exact same (non-GUI) C# code for Windows Mobile and Windows XP/Vista. Only very few #ifdefs were required.
Now that Microsoft is going with Windows Phone 7, where apps will apparently be entirely Silverlight-based, I am guessing compatibility will be even better. Imaging building a web/desktop app in Silverlight/WPF and then changing the compiler flags to make an app that runs locally on any Windows Phone 7. No #ifdefs in sight. Nobody else has anything close to that level of portability between desktop/mobile except maybe Adobe.
Of course. Every PC hardware site worth a penny does regular articles on which CPU is currently the fastest and which will give you the most for your money. As well as comparisons between Intel/AMD. My favorite site for such things is Tom's Hardware, though Google will likely find you many more.
Which CPU is actually fastest heavily depends on what you will be using it for. Your list of "regular geek activities" does not narrow it down enough. Also, many applications contain optimizations that target a particular CPU family or architecture.
Many people on this thread claim that they can't do their job without admin rights of some kind, which is patently untrue
Yet each one of your "solutions" has the obvious effect of stopping me from doing my job. My time is too valuable to the company to have me waiting for a sysadmin, authorization from higher-ups or jumping through bureaucratic hurdles every time a trivial task like installing or upgrading an application/library/whatever has to be performed.
Of course I have local admin rights on my workstation. It's trivial to re-image should I mess it up (hasn't happened yet, mind) and it lets me do my job as efficiently as possible. Of course, since I'm a professional, I don't abuse my admin rights to do anything that might be a nuisance to anybody else. Not that I could do much with just the admin rights to my own workstation. Saturate the network, perhaps - but then an admin would drop by to give me a slap on the wrist within minutes, as the network is properly monitored.
Did I mention, me and my co-developers also have admin rights on the testing, and production servers? Yes, production. Again this is about empowering professional developers to carry out their jobs as efficiently as possible. What if I should screw up and drop all the tables on the production db, you ask? Well, it's obvious I wouldn't do anything like that intentionally, but otherwise, that's what backups are for. Not that I'd expect to keep my job should I make such a mistake.
Perhaps if you work in a "shop" full of pimply-faced code monkeys who can't be trusted with admin rights to the testing environment, or even the computers on their desks, then lots of policies and nazi sysadmins are quite in order. But perhaps then the real problem is with the recruitment standards. I for one wouldn't want to work in a place were such restrictions were necessary.
Every month, I pay my landlord (a professor; I'm his only tenant) with a check. I wonder what system would replace that, that would be significantly different from checks, but that my landlord could accept?
Set up a reoccuring transfer at your bank's website. Since you are posting to Slashdot I don't believe using an on-line bank would be a problem for you. You only need your landlord's account number, and you'll save him the bother of cashing in the checks.
Also, what if I run over someone's bicycle, and I want to give him a blank check to pay for it?
Disregarding how stupid it is to give someone a blank check, you could just give him your contact details and reimburse him later. Or make arrangements directly with the bicycle repair shop.
Or, more realistically, what if I need to pay an individual that I have only just met more money than I have in cash?
On-line transfer. Dunno what bank you're using but mine lets me transfer money from my account to anyone else's using my phone (either by calling their service desk or by going to the bank's website via 3G).
If your bank does not provide basic on-line services, switch banks. I wish we could just do away with cash altogether. The problem isn't techical, it's political. We have all the solutions we need to replace cash, we just need to make sure that switching to electronic money doesn't let the guv'mint (or anybody else) monitor all our transactions.
In what country are high fees associated with bank transfers? Where I live (Sweden), going to my bank's on-line service I can transfer money to any other bank account at no charge whatsoever.
Ahh... so it wasn't that Linux wasn't ready for the desktop, but that your desktop wasn't ready for Linux.
This statement only makes sense if you're a mad fanboy. The purpose of every piece of software is to provide a service to the end user. Anything obstructing that, regardless of reason, is going to be blamed on the software. If the hardware is working perfectly fine with operating system "A", but fails to work with operating system "B", clearly the user won't blame the hardware - it's clearly working fine!
Being an experienced Windows user myself who has tried using Linux (though not very recently) as well, I read the guide to see if things had improved. Unfortunately the guide skipped over the point in the installation where all my previous attempts at installing Linux have halted: when the installation is complete, but you are missing one or more of:
1) Sound (with more than two channels, if even that)
2) Accelerated graphics
3) Networking (wired or wireless)
4) Bluetooth stack
Now, with some tweaking, I know it's possible to get these things working, because I've done it. But you expect me to believe that Linux has gotten so good with hardware now that I won't have to, when installing on a computer that isn't "ready for Linux", but rather a perfectly good computer that I have already bought and paid for some years back, not knowing (or caring) at the time that I might some day install Linux on it?
Don't people realize that Linux actually has much better hardware support than any OS out there?
How would you define "better" in this case? Do you mean that the list of devices that are supported to some degree is longer than for any other OS? Because again, from the end user's POV, that's completely irrelevant. The end user cares whether the new printer he bought on sale will work out of the box. With Windows it can be safely assumed that pretty much anything will Just Work (unless it's got an Apple logo on it). Are you telling me that this is the case with Linux, assuming the user is not going to verify compatibility prior to the purchase?
Of course, if this had happened during an RC release of a major Linux distro, the comments would be more along the lines of "zomgwtfbbq, Linux is so popular now the masses can't get hold of it fast enough" whereas since it's a Windows RC being released, people are taking the opportunity to flame like idiots instead.
Doesn't paint a very pretty picture of the FOSS community.
Slashdot Mirror
I run away from do-it-at-home tests because they take up too much of my free time. It's way too easy to find work as a developer, I'll pick an employer that trusts my interview and references and doesn't expect me to jump through hoops. I'll happily provide samples of prior work (it's on GitHub).
People complained loudly to Microsoft regarding the all-caps of Visual Studio 2012/13 and Office 2013 during their pre-releases. What happened? They remained there, shouting back at the user in the finals.
Not strictly true. They added an option to turn off all-caps. It's a simple registry setting and the first hit on Google.
I so wish I had mod points right now. This should be at +9.
Userbase? Sure. Money? Um, go spec up a 3D graphics workstation and see what those things cost. You don't need a billion customers to turn a profit selling that kind of gear.
1) All patents expire after 2 years. If you can't make money from having a 2-year monopoly on an invention, it obviously wasn't very good anyway. 2) Getting a patent costs a €LARGE_AMOUNT of money, which goes into a fund that the government uses to invest into research. 3) No sales bans. The only penatly for "violating" a patent is compensation for actual damages, the burden of proof for which lie on the patent holder. 4) If out of a random sample of five university students in the appropriate field, at least three find your idea obvious and/or trivial to come up with, your patent is rejected. 5) (Very) generous exemptions from the all of the above for non-profits, educational users and independent (non-corporate) inventors.
E-mail uses push notifications, you make it sound like it's on a 30 minute polling interval but that's simply not the case - it's nearly instant, certainly every bit as fast as on Android. Twitter does the same thing. Just read the documentation if you don't want to take my word for it. Using polling for any kind of instant messaging is not something you want to do since it's massively inefficient, much better to let the server tell you when there's something new to fetch.
:)
As for porting, what you are describing is the same on every platform. You have an iOS app and want to port it to Android? Better brush up on those Java skills because your ObjC is worthless there. You can theoretically use C/C++ as a lowest common denominator between the two but almost nobody does that except possibly for some very core functionality and then you have to write a ton of platform-specific wrappers for the device-dependent stuff anyway. Oh and the UI, which is probably the most time-consuming single part of your app if you want to get it right.
I will give you this - being the minority platform, WP7 certainly stands more to lose from not sharing a common language with Android/iOS than the other way around. I don't really want WP7 apps that are just least-effort ports of Android apps though, and if you're as concerned about battery life as you say then you should find the thought of porting over a big fat VM just to run a few more apps abhorrent. It's not like porting is that hard, and unlike Android, WP7 is actually fun to code for. I've put one app on the market already and am working on a second. Never could muster up the energy to do that for Android, well not on my spare time anyway, there's just too much pomp and ceremony required to get anything done. I do code for Android at work though, since they're paying me well to put up with it.
Strange, I seem to have no trouble receiving mail while I'm doing other things on my WP7. Perhaps because the "extremely limited means" are actually quite sufficient. I believe limiting multitasking a bit is a tradeoff for better battery life, and that's certainly fine by me. Apps like navigation and music players (Spotify, Nokia Music) seem to have no trouble whatsoever with me switching to a different app and back. The web browser dutifully remembers which tabs I had open. So no, not a big deal at all. The Skype limitation I believe is a beta issue.
C/C++ support is probably coming eventually but - are you kidding me? Lack of a Java runtime an impediment? C# is by far a nicer language to program in, and is instantly accessible to any Java developer (being basically Java++ by design). Lack of Java support doesn't seem to have particularly hurt Apple in their quest for global mobile domination. The only possible use I can see for Java on WP7 would be to make porting of Android apps easier but they would feel right out of place on WP7 anyway since it has a very different UI.
Not really true anymore. I've had a Lumia 800 since november and the only two things I'm really missing now is a native app for Google+ (though the mobile web version works fine) and something that can talk to the OBD2 Bluetooth dongle I have for my car. Not exactly your Angry Birds of smartphone apps. Also, a lot of the WP7 apps feel more polished than their Android versions. The Facebook app for instance.
Maybe this varies from country to country, but here in Sweden, the decimeter, deciliter, centimeter and centiliter, hectogram (typically just called "hecto" for short) are used very frequently and you would have a hard time finding anyone over the age of 7 who doesn't have an intuitive understanding of them.
However, we pretty much never use "deca" and "hectoliter" is very rare, though most people know what they are.
This article stinks on so many levels. It is well-known that Nokia had an internal war going on for years around the Symbian platform, resulting in, among other things, the well-designed but effectively DOA Nokia N9 which in effect became the prototype for the Lumia 800. Maybe Meego would have gone on to be a market-leading platform, but it got buried by politics. Clearly this guy was on the losing team and now he's trying to use whatever authority he still thinks he has to trash-talk Nokia.
Yet the very first comment on his blog post is proof that Nokia is far from dead. No, market share for Windows Phone 7 isn't that great, but it's obviously growing at a rapid rate, and even if it never passes Android or iOS - there's plenty of room in the market for a third player. Blackberry was it for years until they shit the bed.
What the world most certainly doesn't need is yet another Android phone manufacturer. We already have more than enough. Microsoft had the cash that Nokia needed and an OS that, while not perfect, is certainly a differentiator. Couple this with Nokia's design sense and you get a phone which stands out in the sea of blandness (and the fact that the Lumia 800 alone now accounts for something like 85% of all WinPhone7 sales in the EU is evidence of this).
I don't want to go too much into subjective opinion here, but my own experiences with the Lumia 800 is that it is a damn good phone and a pleasure to develop for. It performs much better than its meager specs would suggest. It is certainly proving popular in my circle of friends, almost all of which owned high-end Android phones before. Thanks to the apparent ease of porting stuff from Xbox, there is a ton of great games for it. And it's being marketed VERY competently - certainly better than any Android phone I've seen except possibly Samsung's. I have a very hard time believing it will flop.
However - and this is important - even if I'm wrong, Microsoft can easily afford not to have Windows Phone 7 be an instant success. They are swimming in money. And so can Nokia, because they are feeding off Microsoft. It's happened before with the Xbox, the same Xbox that got laughed at and is now making enough money that Microsoft can afford to keep going at the smartphone business until they succeed.
Quite the opposite. Macs ship with the biggest piece of bloatware there is, and it's quite hard to get rid of. It's called Mac OS X.
Try something like Steam where buying and installing a game is something like four clicks (one to select the game, one to click install, one to confirm the payment information and one to start the game). They have quite a few "classic" games as well, updated to run on the latest version of Windows with sound and graphics.
The grandparent was making a claim ("Does anyone really like Microsoft, other than those who swear by their products and services? I really doubt it.") trivially disproved by example, so I thought an anecdote appropriate. I have never doubted that there exists people who really don't use Windows at all - in fact I know some of those as well, but this was not relevant to my point, which was solely to point out that there are, in fact, computer geeks who use Windows by choice.
I have used Linux, BSD, MacOS (X) and Solaris but my home computers (laptop, gaming PC, two servers) all run Windows, because it gets things done and I haven't had a BSOD or a serious issue with it for years. Finding drivers or apps is never a problem because everyone develops for Windows first, Mac OS X second, Linux probably never or perhaps a distant third.
Being a geek most of my friends are as well and Windows is still by far the most common OS on their home PCs. One guy bought a shiny MBP and promptly installed Windows on it. Pretty much everyone who runs Linux dual-boots with Windows. So yes, when given a choice, even very computer-literate people will freely choose Windows. Because it gets things done, doesn't crash and has drivers for everything. Simple as that.
My phone runs Android, though.
Sadly traps like these are a time-honoured ingredient in adventure games... you reminded me of this ancient E2 node, well worth a read. http://everything2.com/title/King%2527s+Quest+5+design+flaw
You chose to wear that leash, don't complain if it doesn't fit.
I have a desk job with a computer and e-mail. I have a cellphone with my work e-mail so I can stay updated while I'm not in the office, but I only really read it while I'm working. I guess if something really important came up my boss could call me in, and I'd be happy to oblige if I could because I know I would be compensated for it. So far this hasn't ever happened, though. My work weeks are 40 hours, although I feel no need to keep track of every minute - sometimes I leave a bit early, sometimes late. My boss doesn't really mind when I leave so long as work gets done on time. There's no punch clock where I work.
You may claim that my situation is unique and that I've been very lucky but this has been the same for the last three places I've worked in. I only left those jobs because I wanted better pay and more interesting things to do. The same goes for pretty much everyone I know. If you find yourself "leashed" to work, your cellphone or your boss's whims, switch employers. There are plenty - PLENTY - out there that care about keeping their employees happy. It has nothing to do with technology.
I wonder if this is simply a more expensive version of ReadyBoost. Similarly, it takes your most frequently used files and puts them on a flash drive for faster access times, in a way that is transparent to the end user. In this case I wonder if there would be any speed gain from using this on a PC running Windows 7 with ReadyBoost? Caching always introduces some overhead, so rather than using multiple levels of "flash cache" it might be better to simply turn ReadyBoost off in that case. My experience with ReadyBoost has been that it does indeed improve performance, but in no way close to using a real SSD as the system drive.
Windows Mobile does not have a backwards/forwards compatibility problem with desktop Windows because both run .NET. The GUI parts are different in places but you don't want to re-use those anyways as a desktop UI looks and works like crap on a mobile device. For the most part, though - and certainly including such basic bits as color management - .NET on the desktop is a perfect superset of .NET Compact Framework on Windows Mobile. Furthermore, the docs neatly outline what is available in CF and what isn't. At one of my previous jobs we used to literally compile the exact same (non-GUI) C# code for Windows Mobile and Windows XP/Vista. Only very few #ifdefs were required.
Now that Microsoft is going with Windows Phone 7, where apps will apparently be entirely Silverlight-based, I am guessing compatibility will be even better. Imaging building a web/desktop app in Silverlight/WPF and then changing the compiler flags to make an app that runs locally on any Windows Phone 7. No #ifdefs in sight. Nobody else has anything close to that level of portability between desktop/mobile except maybe Adobe.
Of course. Every PC hardware site worth a penny does regular articles on which CPU is currently the fastest and which will give you the most for your money. As well as comparisons between Intel/AMD. My favorite site for such things is Tom's Hardware, though Google will likely find you many more.
Which CPU is actually fastest heavily depends on what you will be using it for. Your list of "regular geek activities" does not narrow it down enough. Also, many applications contain optimizations that target a particular CPU family or architecture.
CPU articles: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/review/Components,1/CPU,1/
Best (gaming) CPU for the money as of dec 09: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/best-gaming-cpu,review-31755.html
All CPU performance charts: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/processors,6.html
Many people on this thread claim that they can't do their job without admin rights of some kind, which is patently untrue
Yet each one of your "solutions" has the obvious effect of stopping me from doing my job. My time is too valuable to the company to have me waiting for a sysadmin, authorization from higher-ups or jumping through bureaucratic hurdles every time a trivial task like installing or upgrading an application/library/whatever has to be performed.
Of course I have local admin rights on my workstation. It's trivial to re-image should I mess it up (hasn't happened yet, mind) and it lets me do my job as efficiently as possible. Of course, since I'm a professional, I don't abuse my admin rights to do anything that might be a nuisance to anybody else. Not that I could do much with just the admin rights to my own workstation. Saturate the network, perhaps - but then an admin would drop by to give me a slap on the wrist within minutes, as the network is properly monitored.
Did I mention, me and my co-developers also have admin rights on the testing, and production servers? Yes, production. Again this is about empowering professional developers to carry out their jobs as efficiently as possible. What if I should screw up and drop all the tables on the production db, you ask? Well, it's obvious I wouldn't do anything like that intentionally, but otherwise, that's what backups are for. Not that I'd expect to keep my job should I make such a mistake.
Perhaps if you work in a "shop" full of pimply-faced code monkeys who can't be trusted with admin rights to the testing environment, or even the computers on their desks, then lots of policies and nazi sysadmins are quite in order. But perhaps then the real problem is with the recruitment standards. I for one wouldn't want to work in a place were such restrictions were necessary.
Every month, I pay my landlord (a professor; I'm his only tenant) with a check. I wonder what system would replace that, that would be significantly different from checks, but that my landlord could accept?
Set up a reoccuring transfer at your bank's website. Since you are posting to Slashdot I don't believe using an on-line bank would be a problem for you. You only need your landlord's account number, and you'll save him the bother of cashing in the checks.
Also, what if I run over someone's bicycle, and I want to give him a blank check to pay for it?
Disregarding how stupid it is to give someone a blank check, you could just give him your contact details and reimburse him later. Or make arrangements directly with the bicycle repair shop.
Or, more realistically, what if I need to pay an individual that I have only just met more money than I have in cash?
On-line transfer. Dunno what bank you're using but mine lets me transfer money from my account to anyone else's using my phone (either by calling their service desk or by going to the bank's website via 3G).
If your bank does not provide basic on-line services, switch banks. I wish we could just do away with cash altogether. The problem isn't techical, it's political. We have all the solutions we need to replace cash, we just need to make sure that switching to electronic money doesn't let the guv'mint (or anybody else) monitor all our transactions.
In what country are high fees associated with bank transfers? Where I live (Sweden), going to my bank's on-line service I can transfer money to any other bank account at no charge whatsoever.
I believe the 2004 olympics already tried that.
Ahh... so it wasn't that Linux wasn't ready for the desktop, but that your desktop wasn't ready for Linux.
This statement only makes sense if you're a mad fanboy. The purpose of every piece of software is to provide a service to the end user. Anything obstructing that, regardless of reason, is going to be blamed on the software. If the hardware is working perfectly fine with operating system "A", but fails to work with operating system "B", clearly the user won't blame the hardware - it's clearly working fine!
Being an experienced Windows user myself who has tried using Linux (though not very recently) as well, I read the guide to see if things had improved. Unfortunately the guide skipped over the point in the installation where all my previous attempts at installing Linux have halted: when the installation is complete, but you are missing one or more of:
1) Sound (with more than two channels, if even that)
2) Accelerated graphics
3) Networking (wired or wireless)
4) Bluetooth stack
Now, with some tweaking, I know it's possible to get these things working, because I've done it. But you expect me to believe that Linux has gotten so good with hardware now that I won't have to, when installing on a computer that isn't "ready for Linux", but rather a perfectly good computer that I have already bought and paid for some years back, not knowing (or caring) at the time that I might some day install Linux on it?
Don't people realize that Linux actually has much better hardware support than any OS out there?
How would you define "better" in this case? Do you mean that the list of devices that are supported to some degree is longer than for any other OS? Because again, from the end user's POV, that's completely irrelevant. The end user cares whether the new printer he bought on sale will work out of the box. With Windows it can be safely assumed that pretty much anything will Just Work (unless it's got an Apple logo on it). Are you telling me that this is the case with Linux, assuming the user is not going to verify compatibility prior to the purchase?
Of course, if this had happened during an RC release of a major Linux distro, the comments would be more along the lines of "zomgwtfbbq, Linux is so popular now the masses can't get hold of it fast enough" whereas since it's a Windows RC being released, people are taking the opportunity to flame like idiots instead.
Doesn't paint a very pretty picture of the FOSS community.